


CLAW: A Novel (Excerpts)

by tomato_greens



Series: MFAverse [3]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26457727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: “A bracing look at how a family’s history in the Maine lobster industry shaped one of its progeny, Poindexter’s ‘Claw’ is a rare portrait of how region is central to the self. When the narrator stands on a dock at dusk and licks his lips, he is licking away not only the stiff film of dried sea water, but also, generations of maritime inheritance, the sun setting on his past.” -Kirkus, probably
Series: MFAverse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088417
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	CLAW: A Novel (Excerpts)

**Author's Note:**

> endless thanks to [familiar](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/familiar) for writing [the best possible fanfictions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25773646) in [this universe where the SMH crew are getting MFAs](https://tomatowrites.tumblr.com/tagged/omgcp-mfa-au%20universe), and also writing that Kirkus review I just shamelessly stole and used as a summary. (and thanks/no thanks to Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, you know, all those guys.) happy new year.

They were always shelling peas in the Poindexter kitchen. It struck Will as metaphorical, his mother’s hands steady and sure as she unjacketed each pod and released its vulnerable seed into the rough-grained wooden bowl at her feet. Don’t track dirt in, she told him, uselessly. Will untied his left boot. His right. Still his wool socks marred the bleached-pale linoleum. Like the peas, dirt was inevitable. 

Lobster season almost over, his mother said. 

Yeah, said Will, unless Flip decides to try winter fishing again. 

I wish you wouldn’t call your uncle Flip.

It’s what he told me to call him. 

Well, I wish you wouldn’t.

You need any help? Where’s Liz? 

His mother shook her head. Out with that boyfriend of hers. 

Will reached for a peapod, but his mother blocked his hand with her own; he saw then her palm as if for the first time in years, the rough yellow callous at the base of each finger, the gold of her wedding ring tucked beneath her arthritic knuckle. His father had paid dearly for that ring, Will knew, because his father had begun to tell this story over and over again. Whether this was an attempt to convince Will to begin thinking about settling down or whether this was his father’s first step down the path into deterioration was yet uncertain. In time, Will would come to realize it was — obviously; predictably — both.

You don’t have to do this sort of thing. Go on and get cleaned up so you’ll be presentable at the table.

You want me to call Liz? Tell her to come home? 

No, no, don’t call her back here, his mother said, because after all his mother understood the same thing he did, that the Poindexter home was not a place to return to if there were anywhere else in the world to be; that it opened its doughy arms and smothered its inhabitants into a smear of silent, crusty paste along the underside of the chair rail. She won’t come, anyway.

Trudging upstairs to the bathroom, shucking off Dickies and boxers and T-shirt into a puddle beneath the toilet, running the water long enough to steam, Will found himself hoping that Flip would not try winter fishing again, then wondered whether this thought was disloyal. Or, worse, unmasculine. The boat needed a new engine, but where would the $50,000 come from? Certainly Flip didn’t have it. Worrying about whether his uncle would ask Will to risk death, as Flip himself did, hauling traps from the deeper and more treacherous water to which lobsters retreated in winter months, also felt disloyal. Unmasculine, too, though Will was beginning to suspect that he would never again feel the hot flush of boyish certainty he’d felt at eighteen when Flip smacked him on the shoulder and declared him an excellent sternman. This was because, despite his best efforts, Will simply could not stop sucking cock.

The joys of cock were simple but many, and, indeed, on occasions resplendent: the tender skin, pinkish or brownish, veined underneath with a surging crimson vitality that Will liked to press his thumb into, as if he could temporarily prevent a man’s most vital sum from reaching its logical resting place — its slide into the back of his throat, then its gentle descent, carried by esophageal cilia, into his antrum, where it would mix with the half-digested clump of Chex Mix and vodka red bull — and channel it instead into the profound exhausted emptiness at his sacrum, the hollow part of him that could not help but wonder, as he dug his fingernails into his bar of Irish Spring and watched the dirt pushed out by the waxy slivers, whether Flip would kill him, some bitter morning, if he ever found out how many of his friends Will had blown under the convenient lie of drunkenness, or, even better, Oxy. 

Will did not prefer Oxy, though at times he enjoyed the languid slump of apathy it poured into his aching hollows; no, he thought, looking through the battered glass door of the shower at the sad acute triangle formed by his family’s toothbrushes, he preferred to be awake: to grasp the edges of his consciousness and push. To suck the cock. To hold it firmly.

As he shut the water valve and stepped over the shower’s porcelain lip, Will glanced out the window into a landscape that stretched, beyond the paltry limits of rod and cone, grassy to sandy, then across the lip of the coast as it plunged into the Atlantic, down, down, into the shallow, glasz-glittering waters, underneath twenty feet of which sat a lobster, small for her age but determinedly eating a snail so that one day she could shed her pearl-gray shell, who — unbeknownst and fundamentally unknowable to Will with his warm human bias, herself unaware that in two weeks’ time she would be lured by the scent of dead herring into one of Flip’s netted parlors before being perfunctorily examined by Will, measured and pronounced too small for Maine’s fishery laws and still of breeding age besides, Will who would rather be tucking a cock into the wet pocket of his cheek than holding a lobster against the metal gauge he kept bowlined to the elastic strap of his bright yellow Helly Hansens and who would without a shred of dignity or respect throw her again into the sea, Will who dreamt of leaving his lifelong bed in Poindexter house made up with the same twin sheets he’d owned since he’d started doing his own laundry at twelve but who had never been able to decided where he should go instead, who felt welcomed nowhere, least of all and, somehow, terribly, at the same time, most of all, while subduing a furious lobster who wanted nothing more than what Will wanted, freedom, from the terrible grasp of a power larger and hungrier than he could ever be, freedom from the sunburned expanse and the dorky-square line of the shaved hairs at the nape of Flip’s neck — stared back at him. 

**Author's Note:**

> please come talk to me about everybody's MFAs and/or [try to productively channel your panic at the state of the world](https://skrtomg.tumblr.com/post/629644585871785984/skrtomg-call-your-fucking-senators-immediately) [on tumblr](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com)


End file.
